war and noise... the momentum and the medium... film, games, and more

the boom of the bust

If you care about games as games, then you should be as disappointed as I am to see that Boom Blox sold only 60,000 copies, even with pantheonized director Stephen Spielberg at the helm. Was his own critically panned addition to the Indy series a harbinger of the move away from well-executed formula in both games and films? Or have the formulas simply become more surreptitious about invading our pop psyche?

Boom Blox is a great game. It accomplishes what many party games want but can't do- elicit laughter, name-calling, and a group agony of suspense over an individual's gameplay, all within ten minutes. The physics are so well done that smashing blocks is the Wii equivalent to popping shipping bubbles. But each ball toss, nothing we haven't done a million times in our lives, causes a whole room to hush, tense up, and then explode along with the shower of blocks in the game.

I think the game takes advantage our primal instinct, that need to dash apart hours of construction a castle made of blocks represents, but gives it to us without the need to clean up the mess. There's no guilt, just the enjoyment of aftermath. Cause, reaction, cause, reaction… and at the same time we know exactly what will happen, but not what happens exactly.

It's a time-tested formula. It's proven. It usually works. And yet it failed on the same platform Nintendo made it work. I don't want to believe there is some kind of Nintendo magic that they apply to their first-party games. There were too many mistakes in how Boom Blox was marketed, how its art was directed, how it was priced, etc. blah blah. However, at the end of the day, I can't help but feel that its simplistic fun, like the taste of a fine Italian pasta with nothing but EVOO and a shred of cheese, is not what epic thrill-seekers with a taste for more "refined" fare are willing to give a sliver of chance…

2 comments on “the boom of the bust”

Nothing actually, the art direction was great! I was channeling critics who complained of it being too kiddy and simplistic, which I find as irrelevant an argument as complaints against the cel-shaded Zeldas.

However, I have to wonder for every bit it resonated with kids, what did it lose in sales to older gamers? The characters were properly iconic, the world was visually elemental, and yet there is a "feeling" lacking, as if the Boom Blox look design wasn't hammered home hard enough. Personally, I'd like to have seen much more polish and fun in the environments, but all in all it didn't detract from the fun.